Understanding our Stone Age Brain in order to Improve our Resilience | Johnny Luk | TEDxBedford
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxA1CQOCfqc Video ID: lxA1CQOCfqc ============================================================ hi everyone my name is johnny i used to study biology and i still do as a member of the royal society of biology and how we as a species exists has always fascinated me given how in a very short period of time we've completely dominated our planet where we used to live in tribes just in the blink of an eye in evolutionary terms we now live in rapidly changing social structures being both globally connected but perhaps physically more isolated especially now in 2020 we have entire libraries on the palm of our hands and despite most of us now stuck at home i can still thankfully speak to you virtually our attention spans have shrunk rapidly to just eight seconds four seconds less than two decades ago society's moving fast and frankly speaking our brains are not designed for this and it hurts our resilience so what is resilience psychology today describes it as a quality that allows some people to be knocked down by life and come back stronger than ever like mental shock absorbers resilience enables us to cope with shocks and keep functioning in much the same kind of way as before to moderate the highs and lows and the tendency to bounce back our society recognizes and rewards this trait but they do maybe because it's an exception rather than the rule we always cheer on the little guy that never gives up think of a rocky movie or the embodiment of the uk in the battle of britain in the second world war despite terrible setbacks the grit to never give up is noble it's aspirational it's powerful it also seems to be that resilience in newer generations is weaker as suggested from one particular statistic from j shetty you know the baby boomers resilience is at a high level at 67 compared to the gen z resilience at 37 that's worrying so why is that the exception to the rule you see we have a stone age brain it's a wonderful piece of machinery i have to say we've used it reliably for millions of years and for each generation we've survived and adapted to the environment and it's got some nifty tricks like fight and flight responses to respond to to danger we are drawn to high calorie foods to stay alive when food is scarce we learn the power of conforming to those that are inspiring and being in a community a tribe is important for safety the brain can be nuanced too as psychology today describes we always used to fear the saber-toothed tiger but what if the tiger learned to just eat sandwiches well then seeing a sandwich crumb will also instigate the same kind of fear that's pretty clever it's a shortcut a mental shortcut the challenge is that some of these features direct or indirect might also get in way in the modern world now our brain has remained the same and while humans are very adaptable especially physically like the idea of just putting on clothes when it's cold we need to now put in more effort on our mind too and it's something that i really needed when i grew up so my story is simple from the start i felt a little bit out of place my ancient brain could not compute could not understand why i was born on the other side of the world in a place called hong kong but then within one month moved to europe bouncing along different countries to holland to germany and of course now to the uk my brain is western i think british but i look and i think oh man i i've looked different my brain my caveman brain was shouting where's your tribe bro like is this is this your tribe you know are you the odd one out and i stereotyped myself as a as a nerd a goody two-shoes chinese kid who likes jackie chan which i still do and it's my but it's that internal negative narrative of myself that was holding me back it made me very self-conscious very insecure my mood changed day by day i felt lost and my brain over fought i didn't feel particularly resilient as a kid and i think it's fair to say a lot of teenagers now probably also feel insecure with their own unique battles thankfully as i grew up i found sport in this very hall i once accidentally signed up to do rowing because you have to write the initial r and i actually meant to put rugby which is also r right so but hey i joined rowing which was cool except i was awful i fell in the pond on my first day and in that photo behind me that's the british championships we actually sank about 20 seconds after that photo was taken so famous for sinking a boat in the in the national title so that was great but what i found from that experience was it gave me a routine it gave me a focus it gave me a system you know six days a week training in my team in my tribe the brain can be surprisingly irrational but in sport it can be quite simple black and white it measures your progress objectively you're either the fastest or you're not it doesn't matter who you know or what you look like it's also reassuring and satisfying how broadly linear it is the more you put in the more you get out and eventually we did thankfully in 2009 we did win the national title but what it did was it condensed the complexity of life my doubts my worries into something simple but what it also does is it stops delusion i had a good friend stuart inns he who represented great britain in the real olympics he's much better than me and he has had to overcome a lot himself and he shared me the theory of the stocktail paradox where blind optimism just having a good day is not enough and needs to be married with reality otherwise it's just delusion and the brain actually gets less resilient when the good times don't happen you know if you feel let down all the time resilience is about having a rational and honest conversation with your brain james stockton was the most senior navy officer from the u.s that was shot down during vietnam and he was taken prisoner for seven years where he and his peers endured terrible treatment and torture he survived and when he returned to the u.s he commented it was the blind optimist that didn't make it first the repeated false dawns the false hopes actually broke them so my first lesson on resilience is that objectively measuring and quantifying life really helped strengthened my resilience and hopefully yours breaking down the complexities into something structured with clear focused tangible goals helps so what can be your goals and how can we quantify them what makes them realistic these goals will change over time and the process of just having something to do is as important as the destination indeed almost more important you know how many people have felt lost after spending a lot of time on a specific moment perhaps organizing a wedding or trying to uh work on an exam and passing the exam or doing a dissertation deadline the process matters to engage the brain i've certainly done this outside of sport outside of rowing too every day before i sleep i do a quick review of my day i ask my highlights and my low lights i reflect how things can go better the next day and i give my day out of 10 and you can see the mood swings over time and if you're resilient those mood swings kind of become less varied another part of the story is about maintaining the motivation to do these goals your brain needs to care we need a meaningful goal what might be yours so continue with the rowing theme here's a story about ancient greece two and a half thousand years ago the athenian senate in athens voted to put down a rebellion of a vessel state basically another city was unhappy and wanted to be independent they sent a trireme which is like a really ancient boat with rowers to row across the aegean sea to instruct a local garrison to slaughter all the rebels and enslave the women and children quite against the principle of of athenian philosophy of justice actually a little while later the senate kind of sat around and thought you know maybe they were just a little bit too harsh and they changed their mind feeling that their punishment was cruel and so they had a vote and then knowing that they've already sent a messenger to slaughter people and trying to kind of like redact an email in the modern day they sent another charim to chase after the original tribe to go and cancel the instruction and even though there were a whole day behind this new triarin achieved it they rode across the agency in record time why because they were motivated they would eat while they rode they would only sleep in shifts and they managed to catch up and stop the slaughter they had a clear goal and a clear motivation their brain understood the sense of importance the purpose to save lives it's tangible it's simple and if you've ever worked on something that you're really passionate about you feel less tired and it's a superpower it's the kind of power that we see now every day from essential workers battling on crazy long shifts during the pandemic they are super men and women so resilience in my second lesson is that you also need meaningful purpose what replaces the stone age brain of needing food and water it doesn't have to be as grand as crossing a gnc but it needs to be as tangible with realistic rules of when and how to achieve it we need to override our brain from just finding food into something modern returning to my story i found through sport but also as i got older that i needed to unlearn things about what i told myself i may be happier because i was allowed allowing my brain to overwrite bad internal thoughts about myself a popular podcaster called naval raphicon said sometimes you need to be willing to start from scratch within our inner dialogue you become more open-minded to change too you teach your brain to be able to adapt outside of our primal instincts you see most people want to start where they are now and perhaps they're halfway up that mountain nobody wants to go back down the mountain and then climb that mountain again right people just want to tweak their life or whatever and then they continue up the mountain continuing up that struggle to instead of finding perhaps a better path the hard part isn't learning the hard part is unlearning because we have to fight against human nature and being aware that there is more than just the current route it's what stops us from falling into our echo chambers that we see all the time now in my example a few years later now i found myself running i don't know how i do this but i found myself running a national charity with dozens of staff and like me it was a struggle especially funding wise a common story now of course but also for those in the charity sector i had serious imposter syndrome and i felt un ready to make the tough decisions and i cried a lot i have to admit during that time i did not feel like i had the resilience to cope i see in my brain i had this image of what a leader should be square-jawed the loudest the strongest the most experienced definitely not me i was only 23 at the time ah it was my brain it was my brain again it was my caveman brain where survive the fittest being the toughest person should be naturally drawn as the leader unless you're a certain person that's not how it works anymore in the 21st century i found that of course by watching ted talks looking out for role models and mentors and just talking about the fact that it was hard has helped me learn and unlearn i found how different people could be leaders you don't have to have a ruthlessly bad temper to be a good leader empathy kindness being able to listen their leadership qualities too and you don't always have to be experienced even though that helps if you're a fast learner and unlearner you can mitigate that and i'm particularly excited to see younger and younger people lead companies and in politics i know another way to decouple the brain is to look at specific problems my problems your problems but in a third person way to try and remove the emotional baggage that can come with personal issues put it aside maybe write it down in a neutral way because then you analyze problems without perhaps your own assumptions your emotional baggage that you get from the caveman brain and just to let you know i'm proud that the charity survives and it's still thriving now i found this as i got through more and more of the problems actually like going to the gym it hurts at the time but you get more strong as you become more experienced in dealing with these issues and rationalizing it so my third lesson on resilience is to learn and unlearn and sometimes be willing to be more open-minded and unlearn past things which may not be useful now i want to finish by saying having a strong resilience is a personal journey we all work differently and how we see ourselves is special and unique and it depends partly on how you are brought up and what challenges you faced but by understanding that some of these feelings are normal derived from ancient wirings from an ancient brain can help rationalize it if me a super shy quiet guy can do it i know anyone can our brains have lived in a world where historically there was no margin for failure if you were different to the herd you're gone if you took a risk it could be over we don't live in that world anymore so we have to educate ourselves and perhaps to change the way we speak to ourselves for me it was it was growing but it could be anything perhaps a video game character which you are player one and you're in control or perhaps a character in the book where you are the main antagonist or protagonist use that locust of control to determine your life outcome it is that control in yourself over your ancient mind that will give you your resilience thank you you